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 either because they felt unable to stand a siege or because the commune was relatively stronger in the smaller than in the bigger cities. The latter were by no means unaffected by the general ferment, but their agitations were less directly favourable to the peasants. In several, such as Strassburg, there were iconoclastic riots; in Catholic cities like Mainz, Cologne, and Ratisbon the citizens demanded the abolition of the Council's financial control, the suppression of indirect taxation, and the extirpation of clerical privilege; in others again their object was merely to free themselves from the feudal control of their lords; while in Bamberg and Speier they were willing to admit the lordship of the Bishops, but demanded the secularisation of their property. In one form or another the spirit of rebellion pervaded the cities from Brixen to Münster and Osnabrück, and from Strassburg to Stralsund and Dantzig.

The most extreme embodiment of the revolutionary spirit was found in Thomas Münzer, to whose influence the whole movement has sometimes been ascribed. After his expulsion from Zwickau he fled to Prague, where he announced his intention of following the example of Hus. His views, however, resembled more closely those of the extreme Hussite sect known as Taborites, and their proximity to Bohemia may explain the reception which the Thuringian cities of Allstedt and Mühlhausen accorded to Münzer's ideas. At Allstedt his success was great both among the townsfolk and the peasants; here he was established as a preacher and married a wife; here he preached his theocratic doctrines, which culminated in the assertion that the godless had no right to live, but should be exterminated by the sword of the elect. He also developed communistic views, and maintained that lords who withheld from the community the fish in the water, fowl of the air, and produce of the soil were breaking the commandment not to steal. Property in fact, though it was left to a more modern communist to point the epigram, was theft. The Elector Frederick would have tolerated even this doctrine; but his brother Duke John and his cousin Duke George secured in July, 1524, Munzer's expulsion from Allstedt. He found an asylum in the imperial city of Mühlhausen, where a runaway monk, Heinrich Pfeiffer, had already raised the small trades against the aristocratic Council; but two months later the Council expelled them both, and in September Münzer began a missionary tour through southwestern Germany.

Its effects were probably much slighter than has usually been supposed, for the revolt in Stühlingen had begun before Münzer started, and his extreme views were not adopted anywhere except at Mühlhausen and in its vicinity. He returned thither about February, 1525, and by March 17 he and Pfeiffer had overthrown the Council and established a communistic theocracy, an experiment which allured the peasantry of the adjacent districts into attempts at imitation. Even Erfurt was for